meditation

Bright orange poppies, California’s state flower, are plentiful this year, and surround me in the in the high grass at creekside. Vultures soar by at nearly treetop level, exhibiting effortless…

“The biggest concern is that we might one day create conscious machines: sentient beings with beliefs, desires and, most morally pressing, the capacity to suffer,” write psychologist Paul Bloom and…

The winter rains came late this year in California. A series of storms this spring have made the land verdant beyond belief. Sitting on the lip of the narrow gorge…

There’s a new installation on roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, “a spare and unsettling sculpture” according to the New York Times of two huge creatures—a…

The search for life on other planets is intensifying. A field that was dismissed as fringe science two decades ago is now closing in from different angles on the question…

In the early 1980’s, after 15 years of intensive philosophical inquiry into the question of how human disorder could evolve out of the natural order, I had a shattering experience…

At bottom, “localism is the belief that communities can and should find solutions to their own particular problems, within their own particular contexts.” The seeming irrefutability of this idea is…

One of the most renowned neuroscientists in the world, Gerald M. Edelman, calls the human brain “the most complicated material object in the known universe.” Edelman has advanced a theory…